


Iteration

by squintly



Series: Iteration [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Clint2000, Depression, M/M, Mental Health Issues, References to Suicide, angst up the wazoo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-22
Updated: 2013-07-06
Packaged: 2017-12-15 19:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 9,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/853001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squintly/pseuds/squintly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki's seen and done it all-- over, and over, and over-- and now Clint's stuck with him, trying to figure out what's going on and why nothing feels like it should. </p><p>This is the first fic in the Iteration verse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Clint didn’t even have time to shield his eyes. The blue light blossomed outwards, rippling through him and up the concrete walls like flames. A bright electric chill shivered down his spine and the sharp scent of ozone smothered him like a wet rag. 

As the fire coalesced in the concrete dome above the platform and the orange sparks faded from his vision, Clint peered through the rising smoke (steam?) at the hazy something beyond. It could have been anything; a piece of random space junk, a comet defrosting all over the expensive electronics, a bomb. It was only black, and shiny, and small, and that was all he could see.

Then it moved.

One long slender leg slid down into an easy kneel. Which was wrong, somehow; the other was supposed to come up, a knight on bended knee. The figure was supposed to rise—but that didn’t happen either. Instead, bones sagging under the shiny leather coat like wet wood, the figure teetered sideways and fell. The golden spear in his hand clattered on the metal, fell off the edge of the platform and wobbled into a cable. 

“What the—“ Fury said. Clint glanced at him, and the craggy lines above his eyes but not below told him everything he needed to know. Fury felt the wrongness too. 

“Is he alright?” Selvig asked, voice lilting skeptically as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying. “Who is he?”

“Damned if I know,” Fury replied, turning to face Barton without moving his eyes. “Check it out.”

Clint hesitated. Walking up to the curled figure on the dais felt like walking up to a dog knowing it was going to bite you. Any moment the man was going to get up, find his spear and—

Only he didn’t. His shoulders moved, just a little, a heavy breath or a silent sob, Clint couldn’t tell which. Arms bound tight around his stomach and knees drawn up to his chest, he looked like he was in pain. A lot of pain. 

Glancing back at Fury, Clint nodded and started forwards.

The closer he got the more comfortable he felt. The guy was mostly coat and armour. Maybe standing, the fabric draping off of him and the armour gleaming in the flickering blue light, he might have been imposing, but curled up on the floor like an upset child, he just looked—sad. He’d turned his pale narrow face towards the floor, and beneath the curtain of feathery black hair, Clint could just barely see one sunken blue eye. 

“Hey,” Clint said, approaching cautiously. “You alright? You don’t look so good.”

If the man reacted in any meaningful way, Clint couldn’t see it. He crouched, easing up beside the man until he could gently touch the man’s shoulder. The leather was ice cold and slippery with condensation.

“Director,” Selvig said with some urgency, “The cosmic energy isn’t dissipating.”

Clint gave the guy a little shake. He went with it, loose and floppy like a new corpse. His dark eyes stared straight ahead, unmoving. 

“That supposed to mean something to me?” Fury asked.

Clint leaned closer. The man’s skin was beaded with icy droplets, and the blue light drained all colour from his cheeks and thin lips. Somehow, though, Clint knew he wasn’t dead. Dying, maybe, but not dead. There was too much unreadable, understated agony for him to be dead. Dead people don’t feel pain. 

“Well,” Selvig continued dryly, “the bunker is probably about to implode upon itself. Perhaps some kind of action ought to be taken.” 

“The hell didn’t you just say that in the first place?” Fury snapped. “Everyone evacuate, right now. Barton, grab the stick.”

Under the sudden bustle, Clint wasn’t sure he’d heard right. He looked up at the director questioningly. 

“Sir?”

“Get the stick!” Fury commanded over his shoulder as he ushered the frightened scientists towards the stairs. “The spear, Barton!”

“What about—“ Clint began, looking down at the curled figure. 

“As far as I’m concerned, this is his fault,” Fury said. “Besides, rule one of alien contact; _alien tech_ is _valuable_. _Aliens_ are _trouble_. You understand me?”

“Yes sir,” Clint replied grudgingly. 

He did. He just didn’t agree. Clint looked back at the staff over his shoulder, then at the man by his side. 

He made a decision. 

Wrapping one arm around the man’s narrow shoulders and slipping the other one under his knees, Clint lifted and started to run.


	2. Chapter 2

“What did I tell you to do?” Fury asked. 

“Take the stick and leave the guy,” Clint replied. 

“And what did you do?”

“Took the guy and left the stick.”

“Why did you do that, Barton?”

Clint resisted the urge to shrug. He honestly didn’t know. He could patter on about the value of life as long as he wanted but at the end of the day, he was a trained assassin. He’d done worse to better people. 

“It was a decision and I made it,” he replied. 

“No, _I_ did,” Fury said. “Making decisions is _my_ job. Following orders is _yours_.”

“I understand, Sir.”

“Do you?” said Fury, folding his arms behind his back and beginning to stalk up and down the narrow medical ward corridor. “Because I’m getting the distinct sense that you _don’t_ , on account of you didn’t.”

“It won’t happen again, Sir.”

“You’re damn right it won’t,” Fury said, wheeling on him. “Tell you what. You like this guy so much, he’s yours. If, and that’s a big damn if, you manage to get something useful out of him, you can go back to the field. If you don’t, you will spend the rest of your sad little life filing paperwork, I don’t care how much of an asset you are. Understand _that_?”

Clint grit his teeth. “Yes, Sir.”

“Good,” Fury said as he turned to walk away. “Get to it, Gandhi.”

Clint stood for a moment, waiting for the shameful blush to drain from his cheeks. A SHIELD nurse gave him a concerned glance as she walked by. He did his best to smile. 

The man was still for all intents and purposes a corpse. Clint had carried him most of the way to the medical ward, his arms still aching despite the man’s almost scary lightness, and the stranger hadn’t moved since. Hadn’t so much as blinked, as far as Clint knew. Getting information out of him would be about as easy as the proverbial blood from a stone. 

Clint wasn’t good at interrogating people. There was a good reason he tended to keep his distance. 

Out of the big coat and in a SHIELD issued hospital gown, the man looked even worse than he had in the lab. The bones in his wrists stuck out and the cut of his collar bone was almost painful. He reminded Clint of the first time he’d watched Schindler’s List—a grown man reduced to a pile of skin and bones and unimaginable misery. While this guy wasn’t quite death-camp bad, looking at him still hurt. 

Clint took a careful seat at the side of his bed. The man’s eyes were open. Clint waved a hand in front of them. The man didn’t blink. 

“Great,” he sighed. “I hate paperwork.”

And then, for reasons Clint couldn’t begin to speculate on, the man’s eyes slowly slid shut, the corners of his thin lips quirking up just a little, barely enough for even Clint to notice. The ghost of a pleasant thought. 

Clint smiled. Maybe this wouldn’t be so hard after all.


	3. Chapter 3

It was that hard after all.

Stripped of field duty, Clint had nothing to do but visit the stranger and write report after useless report. A good day was ‘he blinked’. A bad one was ‘the only reason I know he’s still alive is that his heart monitor’s still beeping’. 

At first he sat in silence, but Clint had never been good at that. He started bringing magazines, then books, first reading them to himself and then aloud because the first time he did it out of sheer boredom the guy’s heart rate seemed to go up a bit. There was a plus side, at least; Clint had always liked reading, but never seemed to have the time for it. Plodding his way through Moby Dick and the latest Terry Pratchett novel was actually kind of pleasant. In between chapters he would tell stories of his own, mostly second hand tales of recent excitement and danger from Coulson and Natasha. The guy seemed to like those the best. Every once in a while Clint would catch the faintest trace of a smile on his lips. 

And then something happened.

“So Tasha clocked him and everyone lived happily ever after,” Clint was saying, leaning back in the uncomfortable chair the nurses had taken to leaving out for him. “Or at least Tasha and Coulson did. I’m still stuck here babysitting your dumb comatose ass.”

The man’s eyes flicked down. It was the first sign of an emotional response Clint had seen in a month. Clint knew better than anyone what guilt could do to a person, and taking advantage of that seemed like a pretty dick move, but he didn’t really have any choice. He needed to latch on to whatever opportunities presented themselves.

“I’d have been out there with them if it wasn’t for you,” he continued, hating the honest resentment seeping into his tone. “I could have helped. Then Tasha would never have had to fight her way out in the first place. She could have died. She almost did. All because of _you_.”

Clint literally bit his tongue. He didn’t mean it, not really. He had no-one to blame but himself. Still, if the guy had never shown up, never presented the choice—

“I’m sorry.”

For a moment, Clint wasn’t sure who’d spoken. The voice seemed too deep, too smooth for the scrawny bugger in the hospital bed. Like black velvet, or dark chocolate, where by all rights there should have been gravel and grit. It wasn’t until he looked down at the man and saw, for the first time, the man looking back, that he really _knew_.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” the man repeated. “I didn’t expect you to take me.”

The words bounced around inside Clint’s head, struggling to come together into something resembling a coherent thought. 

“ _What?_ ”

The man smiled. Not a fleeting ghost, but an honest-to-god smile, worn thin but there none the less. 

“I expected you to leave me behind.”

He didn’t seemed miffed by this. If anything, he looked a little wistful, as if that’s what he’d wanted but had been too polite to say. Clint stared at him. 

The sense of wrongness was back. After the explosion it had faded so quickly he hadn’t even been sure it had ever been there to begin with, but now here it was, a cold stone in the pit of his stomach that wouldn’t stay still. The man wasn’t supposed to be like this. He was supposed to be… something. Something more than a fractured shell. 

“I wouldn’t do that,” he replied almost automatically, watching the man’s paper-thin eyelids droop down in a sick parody of amusement. 

“Yes, you would.”

“Would not!” Clint snapped. “I’m never leaving you again!”

He stopped. He had no idea why he’d just said that. 

The man cocked his head to the side just a little. Clint glanced away. The rock in his stomach was quickly turning into a fish-hook, ready to pull him forward into a great empty unknown. His pulse pounded in his ears and his hands began to shake, clenched together in his lap. 

The man moved. He reached out, his long slender fingers pale and drained in the fluorescent lights, cold where they gently rested on top of Clint’s. A shiver coursed through him, sharp and electric blue. 

“It’s alright,” the man murmured. Clint’s hands stilled.

“Who are you?” he asked, voice trembling instead.

The man smiled again, crinkles in the corners of his eyes. 

“I’m Loki.”


	4. Chapter 4

Loki, Brother of Thor. Prince of Asgard. Sender of the Destroyer. The one being Clint should have feared more than anything. And Clint had spent a month telling him bedtime stories.

“I thought he was dead,” Coulson said mildly. 

“Apparently not,” Fury replied.

“Should we be calling Thor?” Clint asked.

“And just how would we go about doing that?” Fury asked back. “If Thor was going to come he’d be here by now. We’re just going to have to deal with this on our own.”

“How?” Coulson asked. 

“By putting him in a cell, for one,” Fury answered.

“But the guy can barely move!” Clint protested before he could censor himself.

Fury glared at him. “There’s a hell of a difference between _can’t_ and _hasn’t_ , Barton, and you are no longer part of this conversation.”

“You did say he could come back if he got something useful, Sir,” Coulson gently reminded. 

“Knowing who he is is not useful,” Fury replied. “It just makes things more complicated.” 

“He hasn’t caused any trouble, Sir,” Clint insisted. 

“Trouble is literally his middle name, Barton,” said Fury. “I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.”

“We could put him up in one of the long-term suites,” Coulson suggested. “He’s already been here a month.”

“And when he uses his Asgardian superpowers to break out?” Fury responded. “What then?”

“Then we add on some extra security,” Coulson said with a shrug. 

Fury paused, glaring at Coulson. Coulson remained unflappable. Clint bit the inside of his lip. He wasn’t sure why he was lobbying for _Loki_ of all people. He’d seen what the so-called god could do. The son of a bitch had almost killed Coulson with that death ray. That wasn’t the sort of thing Clint usually forgave. But…

“Alright,” Fury said, the tone of his voice sending shudders of dread down Clint’s spine. “You two want to play nice with Viking Satan, fine. He’s your responsibility. I wash my hands of the whole damn thing.”

“Thank you, Director,” Coulson said.

“Do not thank me,” Fury groused. “When all this goes tits up I will hang your sorry frozen skin on the wall. Both of you.”

“Yes, Sir,” Coulson and Clint said in unison, Coulson a good deal more cheerfully than Clint.

The director rolled his eyes and walked away, grumbling under his breath about fools and property damage and _too old for this shit_. Clint chewed on the inside of his lip again.

“You sure about this, sir?” he asked Coulson.

“No,” Coulson said with a smile. 

“Oh, good,” Clint replied. “That makes me feel much better.”

“Glad I could help.”


	5. Chapter 5

They moved Loki to one of the long-term suites SHIELD kept around just in case Tony Stark and friends decided they needed a little time out. The man didn’t resist. He actually seemed a little amused, slipping up out of the bed and sashaying around the wheelchair the orderlies had brought out for him and down the hall like he knew exactly where they were going. 

“Fury was right, wasn’t he,” Clint said as he skipped to catch up, very carefully keeping his eyes off the slit in the back of the hospital gown and the slice of pale flesh underneath. “You’ve been messing with us the whole time.”

“Don’t be so egocentric,” Loki replied with a wry smile. “I do what I do for my own benefit, and no-one else’s.”

Clint stared at him. “So you _wanted_ to spend a month getting fed through a tube.”

Loki’s smile evaporated. He didn’t reply. 

The suite was on the small side, but well-appointed by SHIELD standards. The bed was a Spartan cot, but there was a decent chair in the little living room and the bathroom facilities were top notch. There was even a little kitchen table for him to eat at. If it weren’t for the institutional greys and terrible purple-pink carpeting, it might have been nice. Loki flopped down on the cot almost immediately, fingers twined behind his head and eyes—slightly less sunken now than before—firmly shut. 

“Seriously?” Clint asked. “You just spent a month in bed.”

“You may go now,” Loki said with a dismissive wave. 

“Hey, I’m your warden,” Clint groused. “I can go whenever I want.”

“Then now’s as good a time as any,” Loki replied. 

Clint left. Because he wanted to. 

After that, Loki spent a lot of time in bed. Occasionally he would drag himself into the living room and curl up in the chair for no visible purpose other than to be there. Occasionally he would sleep. Most of the time he just _was_. Watching him on the security feed, Clint couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy. In the room trying to have a conversation with him, he very much did not.

“You know, when you started talking I figured the whole interrogation thing would get easier,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest.

Loki hummed. He did that a lot.

“Come on,” Clint pestered. “You feel so bad about getting me benched, get me _unbenched_. Give me something, anything. Your favourite kind of jam.”

“Apricot,” Loki replied.

“Yeah, see, that’s not actually useful.”

“You asked.”

“You knew what I meant,” Clint said. He crouched to get at eye level with the man sprawled languorously on the arm chair. “How did you get here? Why did you come? What do you want?”

Loki smiled at him, slow and sweet, and hummed. 

Clint just about punched him in the face. 

Apparently sensing his imminent bodily harm, Loki sighed. 

“You wish to know the truth?”

“Preferably, but at this point I’m open to convincing lies.” 

Loki’s smile faded. The standard issue one-size-fits-no-one scrubs SHIELD had given him hung off his body like sheets, making him look small, a tiny, fragile thing lost in a sea of white. Clint rested his hand against the seat of the chair, close enough to Loki’s arm to feel the gentle chill the man always gave off. 

“I don’t know,” the man murmured. “I used to, but I don’t anymore. I’m just here, and that’s the way things are.”

Clint didn’t reply. For once, he didn’t have anything to say.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1-- Apologies for the late update, there were personal things occurring.  
> 2-- This chapter as well as subsequent chapters contains internalized misinformation and discrimination against mental illness, especially depression.

“What do you think?” Coulson asked, watching the stubby curly-haired figure of Dr. Habib, resident SHIELD psychologist, cautiously squiddle up to the arm chair in which Loki was currently sitting upside down. 

“About the doc, or about Loki?” Clint replied.

Coulson shrugged. So did Clint.

“I don’t know. Medical already did every test known to man and everything came back normal.”

“He is an alien,” Coulson said. “Maybe that’s the problem.”

“Maybe there’s nothing wrong with him,” Clint replied. “Maybe this is just the way he is.”

The two men stood and stared at the monitors. Dr. Habib had perched himself on the edge of the dining chair and was asking his questions, questions which by the utter stillness of Loki’s lips were obviously not being answered. Loki glanced at the camera in the corner and closed his eyes.

“Something’s wrong,” Coulson said. “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.”

Clint glanced at him. “You feel it too?”

Coulson nodded. 

“When he came through…” Clint began. “It was like before an earthquake, you know? Your body can feel the ground shaking, but your brain doesn’t and everything just feels…”

“Wrong,” Coulson finished.

“Yeah.”

Dr. Habib scooted closer to the sprawling demi-god. Loki didn’t respond. Neck bent over the seat and limbs akimbo, he looked like he’d fallen from a very high place, or possibly several. The doc leaned closer and closer. Clint bit the inside of his cheek.

The Loki on the screen didn’t move, but Dr. Habib sure as hell did. He scrambled to the door so fast he almost fell, and Clint heard the door slam shut all the way down the hall. Loki’s lips quirked up into a lopsided smirk. Clint couldn’t help but smile.

“You alright, doc?” Coulson asked as the little man came storming around the corner. 

“No!” Dr. Habib squawked. “Yes. I’m fine.”

“He booed you, didn’t he,” Clint asked.

Dr. Habib blinked, his eyes gigantic behind his round-framed glasses. “How did you know?”

“Just a guess,” Clint replied with a badly concealed chuckle.

As Dr. Habib flushed, Coulson tactfully changed the subject. 

“So what do you think, doc?”

“Nothing,” the doctor huffed. “He refused to talk to me. From the footage and your testimony, however, I would say he’s depressed.”

Clint blinked. “What, like Eeyore?”

Habib glared at him. “Yes, like Eeyore, only not at all and considerably worse.”

“But he looks fine,” Clint said, glancing at the bank of monitors and the man now sitting more normally in his chair, tapping his foot idly. 

“He was catatonic for almost a month,” the doctor argued. “That is _not_ fine. That’s the worst case of clinical depression I have ever seen, and working here I’ve seen a lot.”

“So what do we do?” Coulson asked before Clint could respond. 

The doctor shot Clint another glare before answering. “We start him on a heavy dose of antidepressants and begin therapy immediately.”

“So what, we just drug him into oblivion and hope?” Clint asked, a thread of red-hot anger weaving into his voice without his permission. He really wasn’t sure _why_ he was pissed off. He just _was_. 

“No, we’re not going to _drug him into oblivion_ ,” Habib snapped back. “We’re going to give him a carefully prescribed dose of a clinically tested medication to treat his symptoms, which is what doctors _do_.”

“Oh, please,” Clint scoffed. “Where’d you get your PhD, Devry?”

To Clint’s eternal surprise and mild delight, Habib actually started towards him. Clint had no idea what the chubby little man was planning to do, and unfortunately he never found out; Coulson put a calming—and restraining—hand on the man’s shoulder. 

“Let’s go with the _doctor’s orders_ for now and see what happens,” the older man suggested with no room for argument. 

Habib looked smugly at Clint. Clint smoldered back. Coulson quickly thanked the man and ushered him away, leaving Clint in the security room alone. 

On the monitors, Loki tapped his foot, up and down, up and down. He looked fine. Happy, even, one of his tiny smiles pulling his lips back. The crushing feeling in Clint’s chest was totally unreasonable. 

It was the wrongness. That was all. Whatever that meant.


	7. Chapter 7

When Clint was a kid, he’d had moments—long ones, weeks, sometimes months—when it was all he could do to get up in the morning. He still had moments like that, every once in a while. Moments when he was so tired his bones hurt, when his eyes ached, when all he wanted to do was go back to bed even when he was already in it. Everyone did. It was normal. He was tired, that’s all. Just needed a little break from the world. 

Loki was having a moment, that much was obvious. Watching him haul himself out of bed every morning, Clint could practically feel the weight tugging on his bones, the inescapable exhaustion pinning his arms and legs to the uncomfortable-yet-welcoming embrace of his cot. He’d snap out of it sooner or later. Clint always had. 

Dr. Habib certainly wasn’t helping. An hour a day three days a week he was in there, poking at Loki’s mind with a pickaxe while Loki sat silently inventing new and interesting ways to express boredom. As far as Clint could tell, Habib was just asking the same questions over and over hoping to get an answer one of these days. It made Clint wonder which of the two was actually the crazy one. Clint certainly had no trouble getting Loki to talk.

“I’m just saying, these kinds of things go faster when you just agree with everything the doc says,” Clint groused, making Loki’s bed for no particular reason other than that it had been annoying him for days and he could. 

“Faster is not the issue,” Loki sighed, once again sprawled upside down in his chair, his long hair brushing against the floor. “He’ll realize I’m a lost cause sooner or later. I wouldn’t want to encourage him.”

Clint fluffed a pillow. 

“Yeah. ‘Cause you’re fine, right? I told him so, but no-one ever listens to me.”

Loki sighed. “I know the feeling.”

“I had to talk to him once,” Clint said.

Loki looked up at him, blinking in honest surprise, the first time Clint had seen a spontaneous emotion on his face. “Truly?”

“Yeah,” Clint replied, focusing on stuffing the pillow back into its casing. “After the Destroyer I got a little down and Coulson made me go in for an eval before he let me back into the field.”

Staring at him for a moment, Loki said thoughtfully, “I did not know that.” 

“How could you?” Clint laughed, tossing the pillow back from whence it came. 

Loki said nothing.

“Anyway,” Clint continued, “The guy’s a jack ass. I’m telling you, just agree with whatever he says and he’ll be out of your hair in a week.”

“Is that what you did?” Loki asked quietly. 

“Yeah,” Clint replied. “That’s what everyone does.”

The other man didn’t reply. The heaviness that had been ebbing and flowing in Clint’s chest for the past week came back with a vengeance. He coughed.

“So, you want something?” he asked.

“Not particularly,” Loki murmured.

“No books, nothing?” Clint asked again, flopping down on the newly made bed. “I could probably pull some strings and get you a TV or something.”

“I’m fine,” the man insisted. 

“You sure?” he asked yet again. “If I was stuck in this room with nothing to do I’d lose it.”

One of those small tight smiles tugged at Loki’s lips. “Perhaps a book then.”

“Sweet,” Clint said, hopping up. “I just got _Going Postal_ and I’ve been itching to read it.” 

Loki’s eyebrow quirked, which looked very strange on an upside down face. “You’re going to read it to me, are you?”

Clint stopped. Then he said, as if it was what he’d meant all along, “Of course. You’re Viking Satan, you can only read like, Nordic runes and crap, right?”

This time, Loki’s smile was genuine. Lop sided, a little toothy, bright and fleeting and so achy in all the right ways that, for a moment, Clint forgot to breathe.

“Of course,” Loki said. “Your thoughtfulness continues to amaze.” 

Clint clumsily made his excuses and left, the afterimage of that smile burned onto the backs of his eyes for the rest of the day. The heaviness in his chest got just a little bit lighter.


	8. Chapter 8

Reading to a sentient potato was one thing. Reading to a living man, tossed over various surfaces like a throw rug and making a running commentary, was something else entirely. 

“’Quite,’ said Adora Belle Dearheart,” Clint read. 

“She’s going to fall in love with him,” Loki said.

“Shut up and listen, will you?”

“Any imbecile can see she’s going to fall in love with him,” the demi-god sprawled over the cot continued. “You may as well skip to the end.”

“Is that what you want me to do?” Clint threatened. 

“No,” Loki said nonchalantly with a little wave. “You may continue.”

“You sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“Because if I’m boring you—“

“You are, with this idle conversation.”

“Fine, then,” Clint groused, turning back to the book. “’I now have no sense of humour whatsoever. Well, now that we’ve been appropriately human towards one another—‘”

Loki’s shoulder’s jerked and a little sound bearing a passing resemblance to a laugh came out of him. Clint looked up to see him repressing a grin, the tensed lips and glittering eyes a mischievous expression all on their own. 

“What is it now?”

“Nothing,” the man said with feigned innocence. “Do go on.”

“I will smack you with this book.”

Loki’s grin burst open like a split albino watermelon. “It’s ‘a-pro-pree-at-ly’, not ‘a-pro-pry-at-ly’.”

Blood rushing to his face, Clint scoffed. “It’s my language, I can say it however I want.”

“Since the author is British, technically it’s not.”

“Shut up,” Clint groused. “The hell does a Norse God get off having an English accent for, anyway?”

“If you’re embarrassed I could read if for you,” Loki offered, sitting up. Clint scoffed again and held the book to his chest.

“I’m not embarrassed, and you can’t read, remember?” 

A wave of deliberate ignorance washed over Loki’s face, just barely concealing the mirth beneath. 

“Oh yes. Of course. How ever could I have forgotten.”

Clint paused, looking back down at the book in his hands. Every once in a while—not often, but sometimes—Loki would say something or do something that sparked this— _something_ in him he couldn’t quite explain. Sometimes it felt like familiarity, other times attraction, or some unnameable unreadable thing Clint didn’t have a name for and probably never would. It was like Loki had a thousand faces, all layered on top of one another, and every so often he’d smile or sigh or just be and an edge would curl up revealing one of the multitude underneath. It was always brief, never more than a second at most, but the afterimages took ages to fade away. 

“Have I offended you?” Loki asked, tilting his head to one side.

“No,” Clint said quickly and continued reading.


	9. Chapter 9

“Did you hear?” Coulson asked one day over lunch. 

“Hear what?” Clint asked back through a big bite of bacon cheeseburger. 

“Dr. Habib finally got Loki to talk,” Coulson replied before munching on his salad. 

Clint blinked. “Seriously?”

“Yup,” Coulson said with a smile. “Abraham came hopping into the commissary last afternoon and spent all his alcohol credits buying people drinks.” 

An uneasy feeling opened up in Clint’s gut, cold and hard and heavy. 

“Why would he do that?”

“To celebrate his upcoming Nobel prize in interspecies psychology, presumably,” Coulson replied. 

Clint shook his head. “Not Habib, Loki.”

Coulson took a long moment to chew, watching him closely. Clint squirmed in his seat and snarfed a fry to hide it. 

“Because he has a mental illness and is seeking treatment for it, I imagine,” Coulson finally answered. 

“He doesn’t, though,” Clint said. “When I’m with him he’s fine.”

“Then it’s probably the other twenty three hours of the day he’s worried about,” Coulson replied.

“But it’s not like he’s all weepy or crazy or whatever,” Clint insisted, eating another fry. “He’s just bored, mostly. Who wouldn’t be, locked alone in the room all damn day.”

“He didn’t move for a month.”

“I know,” Clint snapped. 

Expression unreadable as always, Coulson sat back, staring at him, his fork dangling between his fingers. Clint found himself squirming again, grinding his teeth, the weight in his everything dragging him down. He knew Coulson thought he was losing it. Ever since the Destroyer, Coulson had been walking on eggshells around him, not that you could really tell. Pushing him to do this, holding him back from doing that, keeping him in the corner of his eye like a disobedient child. So Clint had reacted badly to almost getting killed by an alien and watching his mentor and second best friend in the world get blown up by a giant death robot. Most people would. That didn’t make him crazy. That didn’t mean he _needed help_. In any case, he’d gotten his mojo back after a few weeks. All that was over now, and he wished to every god there was that Coulson would stop pointedly not bringing it up. 

“That was different,” Clint said, shoving the fries around his plastic plate with another fry. “He was sick. That wasn’t his fault.” 

Quietly, Coulson replied. “Neither is this.”

After a moment, Clint shoved his fries away, muttering a lukewarm ‘not hungry’, and left.


	10. Chapter 10

“I thought you didn’t want to encourage him.” 

Loki sighed, letting his head fall over the edge of the bed to look at Clint upside down. “He was being insufferable. I decided to take your advice.”

The weight eased off of Clint’s chest. 

“So you’re just joshing him, then?”

“That’s not the terminology I would use,” Loki replied. “But if you would prefer to think of it that way, then yes.”

Clint nodded and sat down cross-legged next to the cot. He snagged the book up from under the bed and flipped it open to the bookmark. It wasn’t in the right place.

“You kick it or something?” he asked with a chuckle, looking up at Loki’s upside-down face. 

“No,” Loki replied. “Apologies. We were almost at the end of the chapter.”

Clint stared down at the book in his hands. The weight suddenly plunged right back, deeper and harder this time, so cold it burned. 

“What do you mean?”

Loki sighed again, rolling his eyes in exasperation. 

“Please, Clint. I am a god. I can speak, read or write in any language I chose. You don’t need an excuse.”

Every comment, every jab at his pronunciation or patient, condescending explanation of a word he didn’t know came rushing back. Every smile and chuckle and grin. 

The paperback began to bend under his fingers. His nails left half-moon dents in the cover. 

“Clint?” Loki asked quietly.

“Must be pretty funny, huh,” Clint said. 

Loki paused.

“Pardon?”

“God of fucking lies,” Clint laughed. “Guess I should have read the label better.”

Loki blinked, then rolled off the bed to kneel across from him, the same position he’d been in when they’d first met. His eyes weren’t sunken at all now. He’d filled out a bit, taken the edge off his bones even if they still poked through. Darkness still lurked behind his eyes, a deep unimaginable well Clint couldn’t begin to see the bottom of, but there was something on top now, a thin skein of sunlight reflecting back at him, currently dashed to tiny hopeful pieces by a sudden rain. Loki smiled, brief and uncertain, and Clint’s chest ached. 

“I had no intention of tricking you,” Loki said, as earnestly as Clint had ever heard him. 

“You just had a grand old time making me read out loud for no damn reason.”

“No, not—“ Loki paused again. Clint saw him swallow, watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down, the long line of the man’s throat that made him want to instantly forgive him and the lie bubbling up inside that wouldn’t let him. “I—enjoy listening to you. You have never read to me before.”

Clint stared at him, not sure whether to respond or just walk the hell away. It was such a stupid little thing, such a stupid thing to be angry about, but he’d had enough of being the slow one, the stupid one, the one everyone else laughed at behind their backs. He didn’t care if Loki enjoyed it or not, or—

“What do you mean?” he demanded, fury suddenly turning righteous. “I read to you practically every damn day when you were pretending to be a vegetable!”

Loki looked away. The cold heat rose until Clint could taste it, the sour, bitter taste of anger he’d thought he’d left behind along with Barney. He hadn’t been betrayed since, hadn’t allowed himself to be betrayed, and this was such a dumb little thing to feel betrayed over, but it didn’t matter. It was the principle of the thing. Loki had lied to him, made him feel like an idiot. He was done. 

“Yeah, of course you don’t remember,” Clint spat, shoving himself to his feet. “I’m not very memorable.”

He had every intention of walking out that door and never, ever coming back. Fury would have to let him back to work; he’d gotten Loki to open up, start talking to someone else for a change. As far as he was concerned his job was done. 

And then Loki grabbed his wrist.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even hold on particularly hard. His long cold fingers just wrapped around his wrist, just enough to snag him, just enough to stop him, loosening immediately so he could pull away any time he wanted. Clint looked back down at the man kneeling in front of him.

Loki looked back up at him. There was something rising through the endless depths of his eyes. Something that twisted the heat in Clint’s chest and turned cold again. 

“Ask me,” the god of lies said. “Ask me.”

Clint took a long, shuddering breath. 

“Tell me.”


	11. Chapter 11

They sat across from each other, Loki with his long legs crossed and Clint with his own spread out before him. Clint watched Loki; Loki watched his own hands. Slowly, hesitantly, the man began. 

“You won’t understand at first,” he said. “You might _know_ , but you won’t understand. You aren’t supposed to. Just try and listen, and eventually it will all make sense.”

Clint nodded and said nothing. 

Loki sighed.

“Do you remember the first time I spoke to you? You told me you would never leave me again.”

Clint nodded slowly. 

“You said that because you had. Just a few moments before I stepped through the gate, in fact. We were there in the bunker, and you were presented with a choice, and you chose to follow Fury’s orders and apparently lived to regret it. I do not know. I didn’t survive the explosion.”

Clint blinked. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Alternate realities,” Loki said, as if he were speaking to a stupid child or to the thousandth gaggle of tourists of the day. “Consecutive realities is, perhaps, the better term. Before I was in this eventuality wherein you deigned to rescue me, I was in another in which you did not.”

“Yeah, I get that part,” Clint snapped; working at SHIELD, the idea was not new to him. “I meant the ‘you didn’t survive’ bit.” 

Loki glanced up at him and smiled gently. “As I said, consecutive realities is the more appropriate term. In your average alternate reality scenario it is individual choices which propagate new universes. In this case, the realities are arranged along a sort of chain along which I pass, one after the other, entering via the portal and exiting upon my death.” 

A cold chill shimmied up Clint’s back. “You die? Over and over?”

Nodding, Loki replied. “There are variable amounts of living in between, but in essence, yes, I do. Have. Will. Whichever you prefer.”

Clint had had nightmares like that. He drew his legs up to his chest, slowly, trying not to let the creeping horror tiptoeing around the back of his neck show. Loki smiled again. 

“It isn’t so bad. Somewhat jarring at first, but you become accustomed over the years.”

Clint swallowed. “How long…?

“Longer than either of us can imagine,” Loki replied. “I stopped counting the years when I exceeded my natural lifespan. The deaths I’ve lost track of. I don’t think about it anymore. Whenever I step through the portal, it is always the eleventh of April, 2012. That’s the only date that matters.” 

“The day you met me,” Clint murmured. Loki’s smile warmed.

“Yes. The day I met you.”

“So…” Clint began, trying to still all the thoughts whizzing around in his head and pluck a single coherent question from among the multitude. “So why? I mean, how? Is this just—I mean—“

Loki’s smile turned into a chuckle, one that Clint suddenly _knew_ meant he’d heard this all before. 

“No, things weren’t always this way. In fact, this is all quite unnatural; that’s why you and all the others continue having flashes, moments of déjà vu and what you describe as ‘wrongness’. You remember.”

Clint scrubbed his hands over his face. He could feel it now; almost see it. Another Loki in another place saying the same words to a different Clint. Static danced in front of his eyes and he leant heavily against the wall. 

“Holy shit.”

Loki continued to smile, but he didn’t speak, letting Clint catch up. Clint couldn’t stop looking at him. He could feel the thousand thousand faces looking at him, waiting for him, comparing him not only to other people but to other _hims_. He felt like he was falling, tumbling through a vast void littered with stars, each star a thing that could have been, a thing that _had_ been, but wasn’t. He knew what Loki meant now; he _knew_ what Loki was talking about, but he couldn’t understand. There were too many thoughts to cram into his one little head. 

He closed his eyes. The vertigo intensified, his stomach lurching. His skin tingled. And from among all the questions one came forward.

“Why you?”

For a long moment, Loki didn’t answer. Clint could see him through his eyelids, through the eyes of another Clint who had kept his open; Loki looked down at his hands, picked at his fingernails. Swallowed. His shoulders bowed under the weight of a shame Clint could almost feel coming. 

“In the real world—“ Loki finally began. “At the start of the chain, things were quite different. I did a great many things which I now regret. At first I believed this was intended as a lesson, to force me to relive my mistakes again and again. Now I know better. This is my Ragnarok. I am chained to the table of my past, and the poison is my own.”

Clint opened his eyes. Loki was exactly as he’d imagined. 

“You hurt people,” Clint said.

“Yes,” Loki admitted. 

“Killed them.”

“Yes.”

“Killed me.” 

Loki’s eyes slid shut. 

“No. I did something far, far worse.”

Clint didn’t ask what.


	12. Chapter 12

“Why didn’t you say something before?” Clint asked instead.

Loki looked back down at his hands. To Clint’s amazement, blood started to pool in his cheeks, just enough to tint them pink.

“There didn’t seem to be a point.”

“ _No point_?” Clint said, the tide of anger washing back up over him. “I could have been back in the field _weeks_ ago!”

Loki turned away. 

“I know.”

As the slower cogs in Clint’s mind clicked into gear, the tide of anger receded once again. There were two tracks—one which thought _of course_ , and another that thought _maybe_. Just maybe.

Of course Loki wouldn’t want to say anything. Aside from Dr. Habib, Clint was the only one who visited him on anything resembling a regular basis. If Clint went back into the field Loki would be left alone for weeks, maybe months. Clint might never have come back at all. Of _course_ he’d do what he could to keep Loki around.

But maybe it was more than that. Maybe Loki _felt_ more than that. Maybe all those little flashes were deliberate, maybe when Loki smiled at him so warmly, so softly, it meant something _more_. Maybe. 

Clint didn’t have time for maybes. 

“I’d come visit, you know,” he said softly.

Loki sighed. “No you won’t.”

“What do you mean?” Clint asked blinking. “Of course I would.”

“As time goes along, old memories will begin to crowd out the new,” the man said. “A week from now, you won’t remember why you ever offered in the first place.”

“But—“ Clint began, then stopped. Loki’s jaw was tight, his teeth gritting together. He had done something _worse_ than kill him. Clint swallowed. 

“We didn’t get along, did we.”

Loki slowly shook his head.

“I remembered what you did.”

Loki didn’t nod, but Clint could see the truth on his face, on the thousand thousand faces underneath. The shame went all the way down. 

But Clint had never felt _bad_ around Loki. _Wrong_ , like he’d missed his bus stop without realizing and unfamiliar buildings were gliding by the windows, but not _bad_. Clint had never gotten a flash of danger, or fear. The opposite, really. He had no doubt Loki had done him a terrible wrong at some point, but… there was something else. Something that drowned out the bad and filled it with bright sunshine smiles instead. 

“We’ve never been friends?” Clint asked quietly.

“No,” Loki said. 

“Not even a little?”

The other man looked up at him, bright blue eyes flickering over his face. Whatever he was looking for, he seemed to find it; his expression softened and he relaxed, sinking back against the wall. He didn’t smile, not really, but the corners of his mouth slid up into a different sort of neutral, one that suited him far better. 

“We haven’t always been enemies,” he admitted.

There was an awful lot of room between _not enemies_ and _friends_. Clint’s imagination filled that room with all sorts of possibilities. Something similar to the relationship Coulson had with Stark, maybe, or the way Tasha had been towards pretty much everyone in the beginning, tolerating their existence but little else. Clint knew better than most how two people could like, even love one another and still antagonize each other at every opportunity. Emotion was a complicated three-dimensional thing. 

“So you weren’t lying before,” Clint said. “I really haven’t ever…”

Loki shook his head. 

“I’ve never seen you read, much less heard you.”

Clint could live with that. He couldn’t think of a reason Loki would want to put up with his stuttering and his mispronunciations and his third rate unfinished education other than to make fun of him, but he supposed at this point anything novel would be interesting as hell. But…

“Why?” he asked. “I mean, what changed?”

“We began on a different foot, I suppose,” Loki answered idly. 

“But you didn’t do anything,” Clint began before the answer to his own question slid into his mind. “You don’t normally do that, do you.”

Loki shook his head again and smiled, thin and stretched but a little less so than before. 

Up until now, Clint had been stubbornly holding on to the idea that the whole catatonic thing had been medical—had been by-product of the travel or some other normal, _physical_ cause. It seemed plausible. Loki had been in terrible shape when he arrived. _Anyone_ would have had issues, half starved like that. 

“I don’t get it,” he said, voice a little quicker, a little higher than he wanted it. “Don’t you always come through like that? All messed up?”

Loki shook his head again. “I heal between death and arrival. Such things as scars, however, carry over.”

“So what, did you starve to death last time or something?”

“No,” Loki said. “I simply let it happen, ten minutes at a time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The collapse, Clint,” Loki said with a patient, tried sigh. “I died in the collapse for quite some time.”

The creeping horror returned full force. Clint imagined him curled up in a ball, just _waiting_ , knowing the energy was going to detonate, knowing thousands of tonnes of rock and rubble were about to fall on his head and crush him, _waiting_ to die. Over, and over, and over. Until his flesh began to wither away. Until his eyes sunk into his head. Until he became the tiny, shrunken thing Clint had carried out of the building. And over, and over, and over, Clint had left him to die. 

“What the fuck,” he muttered. “What the _ever-living fuck_.”

“Clint—“

“Do you have any idea how fucked up that is?” Clint snapped. 

“Yes.”

Loki stared at him. The broiling sea of bile rising in the back of Clint’s throat slowed, burning and leaking sourness into his mouth. Dizziness washed over him and he pressed his hands to his face, fighting back the twisting sickness inside. 

“You want to kill yourself?” he asked quietly, the taste of the words almost enough to make him gag. 

“No,” Loki replied quietly. “There’s no point.”

He would just wake up again. And again. And again. And it would never end, there was nothing he could do, nothing but wait and hope and Clint was going to be sick. 

He tried to stand up but his legs tangled with each other and he fell back on his ass. His hands were trembling. He felt light, static-y, like he couldn’t breathe. Every single day he woke up and it was the same damn thing, the same people laughing behind his back, out-doing him at everything. He was always second best and there _wasn’t any point_.

Loki said his name. Clint couldn’t respond, his throat closed, choking him. Loki said it again, shimmying towards him, slowly, like Clint was a frightened animal and Loki didn’t want to get bit. Clint tried to move away, he really did, but he was breathing too hard and not hard enough all at once. Nothing worked.

Loki carefully touched him, fingers only at first, just above the knee. His hand was cool through his pants, cold enough to make him gasp, a gasp that kept going, wouldn’t stop. Heat stung behind his eyes and Clint had no idea why. He hadn’t cried in fifteen years. 

“Clint,” Loki said, like it was _important_ , like he _meant_ it, if someone could _mean_ a name. 

Clint broke. 

Cold arms wrapped around him, pulling him against a cold chest, a cold hand running through his hair, burning against his burning skin. Clint’s face tingled, pressed against the crook of Loki’s neck, smudged with tears.

He didn’t deserve this. He was a useless hillbilly, a one-trick pony people just put up with, a tiny little man with a tiny little bow trying to stand amongst giants. Some monster or another should have torn him to pieces years ago. That’s what he deserved. Not this.

Loki gave it to him anyway.


	13. Chapter 13

Clint cried until there was nothing left. He tried to stop—he held his breath until he hiccupped, squeezed his eyes shut until he saw stars, clenched his fists until his nails cut crescents into his palms, until Loki gently eased his fingers apart and placed cool, calming kisses against the wounds. 

It should have been the other way around. Clint’s problems were _nothing_ compared to Loki’s. The selfishness of sitting and weeping in _his_ arms stung, made him weep all the harder. Just one more person he was burdening.

But Loki didn’t feel burdened. He didn’t grit his teeth or pat Clint awkwardly on the back or try and think of something comforting to say, some condescending _it’s going to be okay_ bullshit people always seemed to fall back on. Loki didn’t say anything at all. He just smoothed one hand through Clint’s hair and let the other rest in the small of his back, a weight that said _stay_. 

Eventually he ran out of tears. Loki didn’t push him away. He kept going, Clint’s scalp tingling as his cool fingers combed through his hair, over and over. 

Clint had never felt so empty. 

He’d been so afraid for so long. It had built up, every sideways look, every whispered conversation, every overheard giggle. Every failure. Every success, down to luck, always down to luck, no matter what anyone else said. For a year, his life had been a constant litany of _not good enough, never going to be good enough_ , and Clint had no more room. 

Sitting still and quiet in Loki’s arms, Clint remembered.

He remembered crying in the dark. He remembered being alone. He remembered walking barefoot down the hallway of a fancy apartment he’d never seen, slipping out through a plate glass door onto a gravelly balcony, looking out over an unfamiliar city sparkling with light. 

He remembered stepping up onto the railing. 

He remembered Loki screaming his name.

“What happened?” he asked, here and now, muttering into the tear-streaked skin of Loki’s neck.

“You had a panic attack,” Loki murmured back, pressing a kiss that wasn’t a kiss against the top of Clint’s head. 

“Not now,” Clint replied. “Before.”

The steady stroke of Loki’s hand against his hair stopped. He could feel, taste, Loki’s heart stutter under his lips. Loki took a deep breath, putting pressure on Clint’s chest, lifting him, just a little, like Clint was made of air. 

“You killed yourself,” Loki said, his voice steady and broken all at once.

Clint closed his eyes. An imaginary wind rushed by him, past him, carrying away everything he was and would never be. 

“I thought I could craft an ideal existence,” Loki continued. “Through sheer trial and error I could thwart any attack. Defeat any foe. Cure any illness.”

Loki’s voice shifted. Loki’s throat tensed under his lips, muscles undulating as he swallowed thickly. 

“I was wrong,” he whispered. “Where there is death, there will always be death.”

“You gave up,” Clint said.

Loki bowed his head, chin resting against Clint’s. 

“Yes.”

Suddenly Clint understood. 

He didn’t know what Loki had done to him. It didn’t matter. The debt was paid.

Clint had done Loki a horrible wrong, too. He’d broken his heart.


	14. Chapter 14

Clint left. He didn’t say anything. There was nothing left to say. 

Loki watched him go in silence.

There were too many thoughts. Too many emotions. And Clint had room for one of them. He drifted through the halls, utterly aimless, for once in his life completely ignorant of the strange looks he received as he passed. 

Other things were starting to come back. Other moments. Lying on his back with Loki and counting the stars, arguing about which constellations were where. Hitting him, Loki’s slender cheek bone shattering under his fist. Kissing him.

What was real and what was his? Did it matter? Did it matter that one Clint had run a trail of kisses all the way up Loki’s neck while another crushed his hands against it until he stopped breathing? They were all him, and he was all of them. Only he wasn’t. 

And he had killed himself. 

It hadn’t been as bad as he’d thought. Peaceful, really, like that moment just before you fall to sleep and all your thoughts, all your worries, drifted away like so much smoke. He could finally do it now.

But he wouldn’t. For Loki. So he didn’t end up spending another eternity dying in a dark, cold bunker, over and over again until he became a twisted skeletal shell that couldn’t move or speak or die. He couldn’t, wouldn’t do that again, wouldn’t do that twice, even if it meant forever. Even if it meant it was _him_ curled up on the floor. 

He’d lived through the aftermath of his own death. He knew now, what that would do. It would shatter the one person who gave a fuck about him into a million tiny pieces. 

So he would go on. So he would go to bed that night, and lie in the dark staring at the spackled ceiling imagining stars, and he would wake up the next morning and he would come to work and he would drift. He would make an effort to be functional. He would fail, and not care even one little bit.

And, during his long wander, he would find himself outside of Dr. Habib’s office, and he would wonder.

If he wasn’t going to kill himself, he would have to do _something_.

He would knock on the door. And he would go inside. And he would sit and say nothing, listening to Dr. Habib say a hundred different things that all boiled down to one.

_This isn’t the way things have to be._

Clint didn’t believe it.

He knew.


	15. Chapter 15

When Clint came back, Loki was lying sideways in his chair, back braced on one arm and legs dangling off the other, book in hand. It was a relatively human position, and it looked very, very strange.

“Finally figured out how to use a chair?” Clint asked as he entered.

Loki looked up at him with one of those bright brilliant genuine smiles. For the first time, Clint didn’t stammer or look away; he smiled back, and Loki’s glittering eyes got a little bit brighter.

“It’s an ongoing process,” the man replied. 

Clint grinned and grabbed his chair. He looked down at it, then up at Loki, then back down at the chair. Instead of flipping it all the way around, he turned it sideways, leaning one arm against the back as he sat. Loki grinned.

“I talked to Dr. Habib,” Clint said conversationally. Loki’s eyes didn’t go wide. He didn’t gasp. His eyebrows didn’t crinkle in worry or fear or disgust. He didn’t react at all, outside of a little I’m-listening-to-you tilt of his head.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah,” Clint said. “He asked me to come back tomorrow.”

The tilt deepened, became inquisitive; still no emotion on his face but interest. The uneasy ocean in Clint’s stomach began to calm. 

“Will you?”

Clint paused.

He wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t losing it, or unbalanced, or unhinged or any of the hundreds of other words people—including him—used to put others into convenient little boxes and brush them aside. 

He was like Loki. Very, very tired.

“Yeah,” he said. “I think so.” 

Loki smiled, soft and warm. The ocean inside him stilled until it was just gentle waves, lapping quietly at the back of his mind. Loki held out the book. 

Clint took it and began to read.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all, folks. There will be a part two of this (involving this Clint and current Loki) but I'm going to do some earlier-in-Loki's-timeline stuff first, which will be published when it is finished instead of daily.
> 
> Thanks for reading! You guys are awesome.


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